When I was One, I had just begun;
When I was Two, I was nearly new;
When I was Three, I was hardly me;
When I was Four, I was not much more;
When I was Five, I was just alive;
But now I am Six, I'm as clever as clever,
So I think I'll be Six now for ever and ever!
-- A.A. Milne
So here's a self-congratulatory Happy Sixth Birthday to ***Dave Does the Blog. That's 11,465 posts (not counting htis one), 20,557 comments (not counting the ones from the pre-native-comment-capable Blogger days), a whole lot of bad jokes, comic reviews, pointless screeds, pointless day-in-the-lifes, and a variety of loyal readers who obviously get something out of being here.
My only regrets are that I didn't get into blogging until well after Katherine was born.
And to the future? Well, I don't have any plans on stopping doing this. My posting rate and my political/cultural relevancy have diminished a scosh over the past couple of years (i.e., I'm writing less and being less political), so the readership has dropped a bit. I'm only a Slimy Mollusc in the TTLB Ecosystem, whereas once I romped as a Flappy Bird and even an Adorable Rodent, etc.
According to Google Analytics, I'm still drawing about 173 visits (133 unique visitors) a day, which isn't InstaPundit, but isn't bad at all if you think about it. (Those numbers include all the hill-kleerup.org blogs here, including Blog of Heroes and Margie's Kitchen, but the vast majority are to this blog.)
A little over half the visitors come here once; the rest return for more, remarkably enough. The vast majority are from the US and the rest of the English-speaking world, but I actually get visits (legit or not) from all around the globe. A bare sliver more use IE than Firefox/Mozilla. Most are on Windows, though about 10% are on Macs and there are a few others.
The front page, of course, gets by far the most traffic. But besides that, the most visited (non-recent) posts in the last month or so?
Obviously consumer information is something folks come here a lot for. If I wanted popularity, that's probably the direction I'd go. Good thing I don't want popularity, right?
Most commented-upon posts:
And a host of others. The period around the beginning of the Iraq War was hot stuff for comments.
What's ahead for DDtB in the next year? I do very much want to get into MT4 in a few months, which will bring with it a change in the page layout and (hopefully) a simplified formatting scheme to keep up. I expect I'll be nattering more about the US Presidential Elections for the next year and a half, along with the usual potpourri of whatever shiny thing catches my eye.
Thanks to all, though, for your support -- especially to Doyce for getting me started on this whole blogging thing in the first place, and to Margie for putting up with it since then.
Filed under :: Blogging
Congrats on making it 6 years! You're way more prolific than I am as I just noticed I recently broke 5,000 entries.
DDtB is ready for first grade. Congrats - it's fun to drop in and see you every day!
Yay! Hooray for you!
And I love that poem - probably the first one I ever memorized.
Woot, gratz, and other appropriate recognitions of your leetness and skillz.
But.. no statistics on spammers hitting your site? :(
The numbers are so high, the statistics are meaningless. :-(
And thanks for the gratses, people.
Woot! My blog now has access to new power pools! Stamina, here I come!
But can it fly, yet? Or does that come at 10 years?
Happy blogiversary!
Only if it gets a temp power. I guess it could Hover now, but I have to wait until 2015 to *really* fly. :-)
Nah...
I am sure that your veteran status you can get a Jingleblog and fly any time you want. ;P
Or, collect enough blog salvage/drops to build one.